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Self-Interpreting Selves: Comments on Alexander Nehamas’s Nietzsche: Life as Literature
- The Journal of Nietzsche Studies
- Penn State University Press
- Volume 45, Issue 2, Summer 2014
- pp. 118-133
- Article
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In this article, I discuss the legacy of Alexander Nehamas’s 1985 book, Nietzsche: Life as Literature. I concentrate on his basic claim that “Nietzsche’s model for the world, for objects, and for people turns out to be the literary text and its components; his model for our relation to the world turns out to be interpretation.” The criticisms of this notion that I raise have to do with whether this “model” accounts for the way Nietzsche understands self-knowledge and self-realization. I note as well the dangers of too aestheticized a view of Nietzsche’s enterprise.